Serious Opinion at LA Times

The following passage was written in the LA Times by a philosophy professor who believes that anti-semitism is not a problem today:

Myself, I’d feel a bit embarrassed saying to a homeless person on the streets of Toronto, much less to the inhabitants of a Philippine garbage dump: “Oh yeah? You think you know suffering? My grandmother died in a concentration camp!”

This was intended to be a serious opinion piece on the matter of anti-semitism?

UPDATE: It seems that the author, Trent University (Canada) professor Terry Neumann, has a history of inane and downright hateful statements. A BackSpin reader sent us the following:

Trent University professor Michael Neumann recently carried on an email correspondence with an antisemitic web site called the Jewish
Tribal Review, in which he wrote:

“My sole concern is indeed to help the Palestinians, and I try to play for keeps. I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose…I would use anything, including lies, injustice and obfuscation, to do so. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don’t come to light, I don’t care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism or reasonable hostility to Jews, I don’t care. If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the State of Israel, I still don’t care.”

When these remarks came to light, Neumann was forced to apologize.

And the LA Times runs an opinion piece by Neumann on the topic of anti-semitism being “overblown,” without acknowledging his stated commitment to “encourage vicious racist anti-Semitism” as a means to a political end?!

Given the crimes to be laid at the feet of Zionism, there is another simple syllogism: anti-Zionism is a moral obligation, so, if anti-Zionism is antisemitism, antisemitism is a moral obligation.

Was this person qualified to pontificate on the “overblown” phenomenon of anti-Semitism?

In CounterPunch, Neumann went so far as to not only compare Israel to Nazi Germany, but to actually indict the entire Jewish people for Nazi-like support:

[A]t present, the case for Jewish complicity seems much stronger than the case for German complicity. So if it is not racist, and reasonable, to say that the Germans were complicit in crimes against humanity, then it is not racist, and reasonable, to say the same of the Jews.